Technodiversity Glossary

Labor costs are a part of the cost calculation with the engineering formula. They consider the wage costs of the operator plus all additional costs.

Here we should be careful:

If the operator only works with that machine, we can take the total costs of this worker (including assurance etc.) over the year and divide them by the same time of productive utilization “m” as we have for the machine.

However, a driver or worker often operates two or more machines, in which case it is easiest to calculate his/her costs per hour and then conduct all the machine cost calculation on an hourly basis.

As we stated before, labor costs have two main components:

•       w = gross wage

•       s = social costs thatmust be covered by the employer like insurance, wage costs during unproductive times due to holidays, traveling expenses etc. (but not his taxes). They are normally indicated as percentage of the gross wage.

The percentage of social costs is highly variable from country to country. In Germany, e. g., it depends mainly on the company:

•       in private forest companies it is about 80-110 %

•       in public forest administrations it often reaches 130 %. 

(See more at TDiv PR1-C02)

See rules and laws for forest operations

Levels of decision-making are normative, strategical, tactical, and operational. This follows a traditional differentiation in military (definitions by Carl v. Clausewitz 1780-1831), but today it has been taken over by management schools for civil purposes as well.   

On each level different types of decisions must be made. The levels are corresponding with each other and are organized in a hierarchical order. Persons on the next lower level need to be informed about the decisions that are made on the next higher level in order to do their jobs in a convenient way.

(See more under TDvi PR1-A05)

see localizing

Localizing is the second step of the three-step-model of decision-making in forest technology. The first step is functionalizing and the third one is individualizing.

The second step checks for any local constraints to their deployment and leads to the exclusion of non-compatible options. The criteria are the economic suitability for the company (effectiveness and efficiency), the ecological suitability for the local environment (ecological compatibility and eco-efficiency), and the social suitability for the local population (societal compatibility and ergonomics).